The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science

Abstract

Mathematician, poet, philosopher, life scientist, playwright, teacher, Jacob Bronowski could readily be referred to as a Renaissance Man. But in the historical context that would do him a disservice: he is, par excellence, a Twentieth Century Man, who has traced the arts and sciences of earlier centuries and especially those of his own time to their common root in the uniquely human imagination.Bronowski is the author of such widely read books as Ascent of Man and Science and Human Values. In 1977, MIT Press published A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. In those essays, the emphasis is on scientific questions, but in a number of them the notion of art as a mode of knowledge is invoked to make the clearer and its human dimension more vivid. Visionary Eye serves as a companion volume: here the emphasis is on the arts and humanities, but (as the subtitle suggests) science as a mode of imagination comes into play to extend the reach of the visionary eye.The Visionary Eye contains eleven essays: The Nature of Art, The Imaginative Mind in Art, The Imaginative Mind in Science, The Shape of Things, as a Science and Architecture as an Art, and Art as a Mode of Knowledge, Bronowski's A. W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. essays discuss examples taken from across the spectrum of the arts, past and present -- music, poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, and engineering artifacts -- in the coherent context of Bronowski's view of the human creative process.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.